Trade in Technology: A Potential Solution to the Food Security Challenge of the 21st Century

With the path of 20th century food prices now comfortably in the rearview mirror (Figure 1), the question of whether agricultural technological progress would be able to keep pace with growing population appears to have been put to rest. The global agricultural price index in the year 2000 was only one-quarter of its value in 1900, and just 40% of its average value at the end of the 1970s. This is clear evidence that, over the course of the entire 20th century, improvements in agricultural technology outpaced population growth. Of course, there were many commodity price spikes that arose during this time, with the most dramatic being in the wake of the Russian crop failure during the early 1970s when this price index more than doubled. A later doubling occurred at the beginning of the 21st century, when a perfect storm of growing bioenergy demands, low commodity stocks and crop failures led to the index rising from less than 40 to more than 80 over a decade’s time (Abbott, Hurt, and Tyner 2011). As with the earlier price spikes, this has led to a flurry of concern about Malthusian scarcity scenarios, and a burst of investments in agricultural research and development....